Saturday, November 13, 2010

One of the main touchstones for album cover design is the Impulse! Records catalogue - or, that is to say, one of the main touchstones is 1960s jazz cover art, as best exemplified by Impulse! Records. I'm not sure that the 1960s Impulse! catalogue is really quite as revolutionary as many would have you think, but if nothing else they are certainly iconic (so much so, in fact, that their impact might have been blunted by the very extent to which they've entered the popular consciousness) and evocative of the style of music presumably held within: modern, tasteful, and most of all, cool. I think these covers are about the best visual representation of 'cool' out there.

I'm going through the catalogue according to catalogue number, not chronological order. Presumably, they're roughly the same, but inevitably never quite are. These are numbers 1 to 25.

The first one, and already the ethos is there: a great cover photograph, in this case two very hip men with their trombones and an attention-grabbing strip of yellow, and a lot of text in a clean font with different colours. The text is a bit too in-your-face, but they're getting there.

This is the Impulse! look exactly. Clever 'math' title in bright colours and a dignified font, beautiful mysterious live photo that is mostly black in colour. God knows how much black ink got used at the Impulse! printing press.

Two of the first three Impulse! albums are by a trombonist I've never heard of. This is less iconic, and kind of Martin Denny/'exotica'-styled, but it's clever, with Mr Winding's trombone quite literally in-your-face.

This potentially could be cheesy, with Gil Evans on a chair staring at the giant hole that's formed in the wall next to him. But somehow it works, with lurid reds paying no attention at all to the album title.

It wasn't easy to find a good picture of the cover for this album, perhaps because its exclamation-point-overdose title is tough to Google. Art Blakey seems happy enough, drumming in the pitch black. Happy? That's not something you see on many of thse covers.

Nice, but the approach is already slipping into cliché. This is Impulse!-cover-by-design. The results are good but not gorgeoush, and way too much importance given to record label logos (I'm guessing that garish GRP logo was tacked on later).

More of the same, let's be honest. It's a good 'same', with Coltrane the colour of lava and nothing else but his instrument up close and blurry plus a lot of blackness. A baby blue strip houses the logo and winds up drawing the eys perhaps more than it should.

I had a hard time believing this was legit, since it seemed to be typeset in Courier New. Then I remembered that there used to be a thing called a 'typewriter'. Otherwise, very standard. Pretty, but standard.

Manny gets just a tiny filmstrip. This is what cheesy discount album covers looked like in the 60s, but they were presumably copying this and not the other way round. The tracklist takes up most of the cover, but it's still a nice change. Even if it's still really, really black.

Now this is cool. This guy could be a country singer, a prison inmate, or the president of France. Whoever he is, he oozes cool from pockmarked pores. Brown not black, and the numbers look nice. Like an evil 'Sesame Street'.

A pretty well-known cover. Actually it looks like very little thought went into this, but it stands out because blue is the dominant colour and black is secondary, not the other way round. Apart from that, just Coltrane in performance.

And this is lovely indeed. The cover this time is designed, not merely assembled according to specific rules. Two silhouettes look at each other in front of a red background. At first glance it looks like abstract art. Nice.

Very unexpected from Impulse! The quartet in a foret somewhere, looking lost. Very green, and way more pastoral than Impulse! records tend to be. The first cover that actually looks like it wasn't shot sometime past midnight.

The last one, this time out in part one, this is a folk singer, of all things. It's a thoroughly Impulse-ised cover, though. He still looks like Woody Guthrie, but the cover's dark black and the text is in cool colours, all-caps. Fusion!